format-flowed in compose mode

format-flowed in compose mode

[david wen riccardi-zhu]

I'm not a developer and I'm still rather new to Emacs.

Also, as far as I understand, notmuch uses gnus for compose mode.

But I'm stuck and wondering if anyone has a solution:

When sending mail from Emacs, the text does not appear to respect line
breaks when read on a mobile phone. Instead, there appear to be random
line breaks in the text, which makes reading emails rather frustrating.

My understanding is that some time ago, an RFC was passed to make email
compatible for viewing on mobile devices. This solution is
format=flowed. For background, see: http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html

I've been trying to implement this solution in gnus, but haven't come across a solution.

Google suggests I'm not the only one experiencing this issue, see:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41299350/how-can-i-send-messages-with-format-flowed-with-the-notmuch-message-client
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/55ydkd/gnus_and_formatflowed/

The EmacsWiki has a page on gnus and format=flowed, but I've found it pretty hard to decipher:
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusFormatFlowed.

The wiki suggests that format-flowed is enabled in gnus, which doesn't
seem to make sense with my experience so far.

It also suggests that "if you want dynamic reflowing, simply unfold encoded
lines to full length and setup article buffers to wrap."

I have no idea what this means (see the reddit thread for more
confusion).

It also seems to suggest using use-hard-newlines, while at the same time
suggesting that it makes no difference. I actually gave this a shot, and
the wiki was right: it made no difference.

My only remaining lead is that perhaps the issue isn't with gnus at all,
but with my smtp client, msmtp. See:
https://github.com/djcb/mu/issues/569. It's from the mu github, but
assuming mu4e also uses gnus and/or doesn't "send the mail", then perhaps
that's a potential answer.

To recap:
1. If notmuch handles composition, then this is either a bug report or a
feature request.
2. If notmuch does not handle composition, I'd appreciate insight from
anyone who has managed to resolve this issue.
3. Or, any hints as to whether it's worth sending this email to the
gnus/emacs/msmtp mailing lists.

Thanks!

David

-- 
dwrz|朱为文

Re: format-flowed in compose mode

[David Bremner]

david wen riccardi-zhu <dwrz@dwrz.net> writes:
>
> To recap:
> 1. If notmuch handles composition, then this is either a bug report or a
> feature request.
> 2. If notmuch does not handle composition, I'd appreciate insight from
> anyone who has managed to resolve this issue.

Notmuch uses message-mode (from gnus) to compose messages. So in
principle if you can figure out how to do what you want in Gnus, the
same settings should work in notmuch. I don't have any experience with
format=flowed, but there is some (somewhat terse) discussion in the
message-mode manual

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs-mime/Flowed-text.html#Flowed-text

Good luck,

David